St. Francis financial files left in chaos

Things have been orderly the past few days at St. Francis House, a shelter where coffee and cereal are served at 7 a.m. to an average of 10 homeless men who stay the night there.

But things are less orderly at Ruth O’Neill’s home just up Range Line Street, where some of the past three years’ worth of the shelter’s receipts, bank statements and checks are being stored. It’s the trail of documents kept by Lana Jacobs, who left the shelter Jan. 11.

Columbia police are now investigating what happened to as much as $40,000 that was donated to the shelter, funds that Catholic Workers at the charity believe was taken by Lana Jacobs, who co-founded the shelter along with husband Steve in 1983.

"If you looked in the messiest drawer in your desk, you’d have a pretty good idea of what we’re working with," O’Neill said yesterday.

O’Neill is a member of the Catholic Workers group that runs the shelter and is one of several people who volunteered to try to put the financial mess in order. She plans to hire a certified public accountant to reconstruct ledgers of past years.

"It’s going to take a while," she said.

The lack of accounting procedures has never been deemed unusual by local Catholic Workers, a national movement founded in 1933 by journalist/activist Dorothy Day. Often referring to themselves as "Christian anarchists," they lead a humble, sometimes contradictory life that pairs service in the tradition of the Gospel of Matthew with fierce individualism and, sometimes, protests of federal policy.

"They believe in individual responsibility. The technical term is the ‘lay apostolate,’ where every individual person is called upon to be responsible and do whatever he or she can to live out the Christian life. They don’t rely on social structure," said Bob Flanagan, a University of Missouri professor of religion and American culture. Nationwide, he said, the group has consistently opposed war, euthanasia and abortion.

Members of the group say they reject all forms of authority.

"It is unlikely that any religious community was ever less structured than the Catholic Worker," reads an introduction to the movement published on the national group’s Web site. "There is no board of directors, no sponsor, no system of governance, no endowment, no paychecks, no pension plans. Since Dorothy Day’s death, there has been no central leader."

"At their best, these communities are based on trust and personalism, not systems and structures," said Frank Cordaro, a Catholic Worker in Des Moines, Iowa, who met the Jacobses in 1977. They were participating at the time in a "blood spilling," he said, where activists painted human blood on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

Cordaro said "the whole damn movement is reeling" over accusations about Lana Jacobs.

Despite the group’s apparently lax approach to finances, he insisted the Catholic Workers’ lack of structure does not enable fraud.

"If you blame the Catholic Workers movement for what happened in Columbia, then you have to say laws and structure and corporate organizations are to blame for the Enron fiasco," Cordaro said. "We’re talking about human failures here, and they happen in all human endeavors."

Some people familiar with the local Catholic Workers wonder whether warning signs were missed.

In 2003, the Roman Catholic parish St. Thomas More Newman Center pulled $11,000 in contributions from St. Francis House and the Catholic Workers’ Loaves and Fishes soup kitchen amid uncertainty over where the money was going. Loaves and Fishes is now funded by the Columbia Interfaith Council.

"They have taken money at times when it hasn’t gone to the activity they said" they would fund, the Rev. Charlie Pardee, Newman Center pastor, said in a 2003 interview with the Tribune. The Newman Center became alarmed after the Catholic Workers accepted $750 in donations for a mission trip to Central America that never took place. The group also continued cashing church checks for St. Francis House when the shelter was partially closed.

The local Catholic Workers group "was the only organization that refused to report on the use of those funds," said Jill Raitt, a University of Missouri professor emerita who specializes in the history of Christianity. "Father Charlie stopped giving in spite of the fact that parishioners misunderstood why. The reason was everyone else filled out a form saying, ‘We’re re-applying for funds, and this is what we did with them.’ "

"Why should funds that are distributed to worthy causes go to someone who refuses to do the small bit of extra work that says how we spent this?" Raitt said.

After the split, people continued to donate money, filling the St. Francis House annual budget of around $40,000.

Raitt recalls writing a check for the organization that Lana Jacobs asked be made out directly to her rather than to St. Francis House.

Until two years ago, O’Neill said, the local Catholic Workers held twice-a-year meetings to discuss finances, but that ended, drawing mild protests. In the end, say members, it was too easy to trust Lana Jacobs.

"Because of the mind-set and philosophy that goes along with the Catholic Worker tradition and the fact that you live in a community that’s really pretty close and small, it’s easy just to trust" that financial matters are being handled, said O’Neill. "And by the way, boy, were we wrong."

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